The inventor has determined through personal experiences that there exists a need for a practical method for enabling a single personal, or leisure boat operator, including a handicapped person, to hitch a boat such as a personal sailboat, yacht or motorboat to a mooring. Due to the expenses and limited space involved in maintaining and building marine docks, it is common that most harbors use moorings as well. Yet for years mooring technology for such personal boats has been limited.
A standard mooring is a buoy that is anchored to the ocean floor. Attached to the buoy is a rope or set of ropes, also called pendants, that a boat would normally be tied to when not under way. When moored properly, the mooring line is usually fed through a deck fixture on the boat and is cleated off on the boat""s deck. Moorings are usually spaced apart according to boat size, in order to maximize usable storage space on the water.
The standard method for using a mooring is as follows. When a boat is under way and approaching a mooring, the boat""s captain must take into consideration wind speed and direction, water currents, and other surface obstacles to align the ship""s trajectory accordingly, and reduce velocity. During this time, a second person is often needed to stand ready at the ship""s bow. The ship""s captain must fulfill his responsibility by maneuvering the ship close enough to the mooring line or pendent to allow the second person to reach down and grab the mooring line, usually with a hook-pole. These boat hook poles having hooks or loops at the ends thereof, and are manually manipulated at the bow of the small boat by the second person, are disclosed in quite a few patents. See U.S. Pat. No. 4,932,700 to Hart; U.S. Pat. No. 4,595,223 to Hawie; U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,668 to Ferrato; U.S. Pat. No. 5,699,748 to Linskey, Jr. et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,799,602 to Trillo; U.S. Pat. No. 4,276,850 to Valencia. Once the second person has the mooring s/he must keep a secure foothold so as not to lose balance, and take into consideration the ship""s momentum while holding the mooring line in order to secure it to the ship""s deck. The boat is then moored, and the engine can be turned off or sails dropped. The reverse procedure can be performed to detach a boat from its mooring.
There are several dangers and inconveniences to using the standard method of mooring a boat. During the time the second person is in the process of grabbing the pendant and attaching it to the deck, s/he is the only link between the boat and the mooring. The person can lose balance and fall overboard. The person can lose grip of the mooring line and the boat could drift off course. The person is also in danger of being pinched by the mooring line during this time. Often the captain must rely on the second person to act as a guide as the ship approaches the mooring. Also, it is very difficult for one person to successfully and safely moor a boat alone.
It is thus an important object of the invention to eliminate this undesirable standard procedure with its often nerve-wracking dangers and inconveniences.
A second important object of the invention is to enable a single operator, who could even be physically handicapped, to aim a mooring pole in the general vicinity of a mooring device such as a buoy, and have the device quickly and readily attach itself to the buoy even if the boat is severely gyrating in rough water. This is in contrast with the disclosure in U.S. Pat. No. 4,276,850 to Valencia, which has a small target latching device on a dock so that an elongated mooring pole has to be carefully aimed at the small target latching device. Also, it would appear that this elongated pole can injure a person standing on a dock more readily than the terminal portion of the catcher device of the present invention. The present invention is directed to the aforesaid problems and desired benefits involving personal or leisure watercrafts including luxury yachts, and is not directed at, or is intended to cover, the mooring of large transport ships as disclosed for example in U.S. Pat. No. 4,114,556 to Orndorffet al.
Mooring of a small boat can be safely, remotely controlled by a single boat operator from the cockpit by providing a mooring buoy having a rigid upwardly extending vertical rod which is targeted by a catcher unit arm member mounted upon the deck of the boat, having a bidirectional latch at its end for coupling and decoupling the arm to and from the vertical rod on the buoy by remote control. As the boat approaches the mooring area, the arm is aimed at the vertical rod on the buoy until the arm mounted catching device engages the rod on the buoy and thus couples the boat to the buoy. A mooring line is then deployed between the catching device and the boat to permit the boat to back away a substantial distance from the mooring buoy and yet be coupled to it. Upon departing from the mooring area, the mooring line is reeled in to move the boat toward the buoy and the catching device latch is remotely operated from the cockpit to release the catcher arm and thus the boat from the vertical rod on the buoy.
A pair of elongated guide rails extend from the catcher by several feet, forming a xe2x80x9cVxe2x80x9d pointing toward the boat, for guiding the vertical rod on the mooring buoy into a central latching portion of the catching device as the boat approaches the buoy, thereby readily initiating quick and easy mooring of the boat, even in rough water where the boat may be gyrating about. The arm member is telescopic to stow it safely when the boat is under way. The arm member is hollow, and thus contains and guides the mooring line attached at one end to the catcher and at the other end to the boat.